And that's the point at which I'd like to go back to what might have been more appropriately said at the beginning--some remarks about Colin Cherry, in whose honor this meeting is being held. Well, we all owe a great debt to Colin Cherry. Everybody in any of the digital fields recognizes that he was one of the first to see the scope of this field, to write books, like his book on human communication, to hold meetings to bring together people who gained a sense of community as a new discipline.

For all that I think we all thank him, but I particularly have a special gift from him. He was especially responsible for my being here, for it was at the 1960 London Symposium on Information Theory organized by Colin Cherry that an event happened which changed my career path and made me follow the course that brought me here. I came to that meeting as a mathematician interested in computational ideas and Information Theory. I came there with a paper in which I had a little theorem. And what happened was the worst nightmare of somebody coming to a meeting with a theorem.

The speaker before me announced exactly the same theorem and proved it at least as well as I did, not quite the same, but you can't get much credit for just having a slightly different proof. Now that could have been a nightmare; in fact, it turned into a great gift. That person was Marvin Minsky. Marvin and I came to that meeting with essentially the same paper and this led to a collaboration that continued for many years and is responsible for almost everything we did in the next decade and has certainly colored everything I have done since then.

However, in addition to the theoretical aspect of our collaboration on the ideas that started from that paper, an event that played a very significant part in my life came about because of somebody being wrong about a date. That meeting led to an invitation to come to MIT. I turned up at MIT, I came to Marvin's office at what I still think was the prearranged time, but there was no Marvin. He thought it was the next day. So I looked around and there was a computer.

Now, this was 1960 and it was not a time when computers just sat there, but there was a computer just sitting there and so I began poking at it. After a while a student came by and helped me a little. This was no Windows95 with those fat manuals. It took only 10 or 15 minutes before I'd actually written a program. And writing that program, just thinking of something I could playfully do at this computer, suddenly I found myself with a line on a problem that had bothered me for many years that seemed just too messy for me to tackle. All of a sudden at this computer I was working on this problem and pretty close to a solution. A few days later I had actually had it. I had a paper off to Nature. It was on stereoscopic vision.

Well, that was an amazing experience! There I was euphoric with this sense of empowerment that this intellectual tool had given me. And since at the time my regular job was at the University of Geneva teaching and researching with Piaget, children were close to my mind and an obsession was born. The obsession was that children should get that intellectual power and that sense of thrill that I got, that children are the people who most need an amplification of their intellectual capacities. And that started me on this track that brings me here today. Unfortunately, I can't trace it. It wouldn't be appropriate to bore you with tracing details.

But there's one point that I want to make and this point leads to a slight, very slight shadow: recognizing a mistake that I think Colin Cherry contributed to. The mistake was this use of the word information. As a matter of fact, if you read carefully his book on human communication, he actually warns you that the technical new meaning of the word information that people like Claude Shannon and Colin Cherry had been developing could not really be popularized. There's a warning there against what I think has happened. That what has now come to be called information technology and from the inner circles that phrase is understood in terms of this very technical new meaning of the word information. For the general public, information means information and so the role of information technology becomes more like, let's say, listening, hearing the news than making it.

It's more like getting somewhat passively information from somewhere more than what happened to me with that computer in Minsky's office. I don't think what I did there had much to do with information in the popular sense of this word, although it had a lot to do with information in the technical sense.

So to the extent that my little incident, my empowering euphoric moment, was going to inspire a sense of what children might do with this technology, it was something that didn't fit the popular image of what information technology was about. The popular image of what technology is about is far too much about information and not nearly as much as you see in that incident, about using it as an instrument, as a tool to do something.

In the real world if you think of what computers do, most of it is not about information in the ordinary sense. If you think of making a spaceship, designing that space shuttle, setting up the control mechanisms to control it, this would be of a complexity that would be completely impossible without computers. And not only because you couldn't get at sufficient information to design it, but because you wouldn't have this material that would control these complex processes that could allow you to design or sketch your circuits on a screen.

So I'd like to recognize, oversimplifying a complex issue--two, let's say, wings to digital technology. One is the technology as an informational medium and the other is the technology as a constructional medium, as more like wood and bricks and steel than like words and printer's type. Now I think that the existence of these two wings and the fact that for the popular perception the informational wing is highly dominant--because that's the one people can see and that's the one that really affects their lives--has produced a deep distortion of how people think about this technology in relation to education. And I think this is best seen by noting, again oversimplifying a complicated issue, that in education also one can recognize these same two wings.

Part of learning is getting information. Somebody stands in front of the classroom and preaches and information is somehow flowing into people's heads, or so it is said. But that's only one part of education. The other part, which Dewey would have emphasized, is about doing things, making things, constructing things. However, in our school systems, as in the popular image of education, the informational side is again dominating.

And so, it comes about this match between an unrecognized dichotomy in digital technology and a generally unrecognized dichotomy in the education system where in both cases the informational side is best known to the general public and these match one another. So that the image of computers in school becomes one of supporting the traditional role of the teachers in their part of education.

And so we get people talking about finding the best teacher in the world, putting this person on the World Wide Web so every student can have the best teacher. Well, maybe, but that's not the way I think that the technology will change the learning environment. I think it will be more like what happened to me with Minsky's computer--that a problem I just couldn't solve, it was too complex, too messy for me, suddenly I could. My goal in life, which has been my major activity over the last 10 years, has especially been to find ways children can use this technology as a constructive medium to do things that no child could do before, to do things at a complexity that was not previously accessible to children.

And so to take one simple example: I worked with the Lego Company making a little computer this size that you could put in a Lego construct and have it connected to sensors and motor and you could make a little device that will follow a light. You could take the same thing and you could put sensors on it and you could program it to make a sound. You could, and I have seen children do this, make a musical instrument in which moving a slider up and down controls a sound. And then you could face issues like, should it produce sound continuously or only discreet notes? and on and on. As you make this little musical instrument, making it raises a new problem and that raises a new problem and you get deeper and deeper into issues of physics and mathematics and music appreciation and musical history and above all into the management of what's becoming a complex project. And when I say "you" I mean you might be seven-years-old or eight-years-old, because I see children of that age who are able to carry out this kind of project.